With the election of Donald Trump, a lot of progressive Americans must now be feeling what we here in the Israeli left have felt for a long time — outnumbered, unwanted, frustrated, and alone.

For a while now, I’ve been writing about how lonely it is to be a leftist in Israel, to be part of the minority that opposes the occupation and 50 years of discrimination and human rights violations, a minority that insists on challenging fundamental aspects of this government’s policies and this society’s values. About how it has become increasingly dangerous and radical simply to speak one’s mind, as the notions of equal rights and human rights have become derogatory terms, and as open criticism and dissent is explicitly silenced. How scary and frustrating it is to see the values and issues I believe in consistently voted down and publicly delegitimized.

With the election of Donald Trump as president, a lot of progressive Americans must be feeling what we here in the Israeli Left have felt for a long time: outnumbered, unwanted, frustrated, and alone.

What the success of Netanyahu — who was elected first in 1996 on the back of the Rabin murder and a campaign of incitement against the Left, and to his fourth term in 2015 again on the back of incitement against Palestinians citizens — and the success of Trump – who incites against or insults just about everyone – prove is that democracy is not a bulwark against inequality, racism, violence, oppression, and sexism. On the contrary, it is all too easy for people to democratically elect to do horrible things.

Israel has done this for quite some time. It may still try and market itself as a genuinely peace-seeking country, but today it is clearer than ever before that it is not. That veil has come off. De jure has caught up with de facto. Israelis have consistently “democratically” chosen to keep Palestinians under occupation with no rights . And as Breaking the Silence director Yuli Novak succinctly put it this week, “don’t be confused. Occupation is the consensus [in Israel] … We are, proudly, outside the consensus.”

All those who were horrified by a Trump presidency, who didn’t believe it would happen — you, too, are now outside the consensus. This is a wake-up call.

Those eight days were filled with speculation that the “dark eyed” and “black haired” author of a highly popular book in the American Jewish community was in fact Shavit. In the Israeli media, there was far more talk about uncovering his identity than about the act itself and its implications. In that sense it is unfortunate that she didn’t name him, especially since her story describes no less than sexual assault — the crime of forcible touching.

In his apology Shavit writes that he “wrongly interpreted the interaction between us” and that until he read her story, he considered it to have been a “friendly encounter” that included “elements of courtship,” and that he did not mean to cause her any discomfort or hurt her feelings.

Berrin’s hints left almost no question it was in fact Shavit, so it makes sense that Haaretz understood Shavit would have to identify himself and issue an apology to try and get ahead of the story. Haaretz has yet to issue any statement* — neither a condemnation of Shavit nor the act itself — and it remains unclear whether it has plans to take any action against him.

Shavit is one the paper’s most prominent columnists, and is especially well known among the American Jewish community, to which he regularly speaks. Israel’s Channel 10, which employs Shavit as a commentator, has said it is deliberating how to respond. Hillel, the North American campus group, already issued a statement last night that it is suspending Shavit’s campus tour.

Asked for comment, Haaretz Editor-in-Chief Aluf Benn told +972 he has no comment at this time, and will update if there is. My sense is that they are still deliberating what to say, and whether this will blow over and they will only have to issue a formal condemnation — without actually suspending or firing Shavit. But the clock is ticking. Meanwhile...

The Israeli right has worked very hard to erase any distinction between Israel and the occupation — between Ariel and Acre, Hebron and Haifa. Ironically, this is the same thing he accuses Palestinians of trying to do.

Since B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad spoke at the UN Security Council a week ago calling for an end to Israel’s half-century old occupation, the organization has been subject to vicious attacks and delegitimization, including by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. El-Ad’s very citizenship has been threatened by a senior member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, and thousands of Israelis have incited against him, including death threats. None of this incitement has been condemned by anyone in Israel’s ruling coalition.

Anticipating much of the backlash, El-Ad went on record throughout the Israeli press just 24 hours after his appearance in New York to clarify why he went to the UN: “I didn’t speak against my country, but against the occupation.”On the face of it, such a distinction seems fairly simple. The director of Israel’s largest human rights organization is lobbying for his country to stop policies that violate human rights, to stop exerting systemic violence against a people with no rights; in short, to stop holding the Palestinian people under military occupation.

To the establishment, that makes him subversive, unpatriotic, and anti-Israel. Contrarily, being pro-occupation and pro-settlements is indisputably pro-Israel as far as many Israelis and politicians are concerned. No one questions, for example, the patriotism of those – both in Israeli government and civil society — pushing to retroactively authorize settlement outposts built on private Palestinian land that even the government says are illegal. Nobody questions the patriotism of those who want to illegally annex the West Bank without the consent of the Palestinians who live there.

The message being propagated by Netanyahu and his government, and unchallenged by the majority of Israelis, is clear: fighting to end occupation and fighting for Palestinian human rights is not only slandering the country, it’s tantamount to treason — as far as they are concerned speaking out against occupation is the same as speaking out against Israel. This type of tactic works well to deflect criticism and silence dissent by delegitimizing the critic. Applied long enough and to enough people, such tactics set a precedent for seriously curtailing free speech and political dissent; it is no wonder the U.S. came out in defense of...

Israelis emigrating — or considering emigration — for political reasons are inadvertently adopting the spirit of the boycott movement in the sense that they, too, have given up on the idea of change coming from within.

Everywhere I turn these days, many of my peers have left Israel, are leaving Israel, are planning to leave, or are talking about leaving Israel. My family and I included.

The reasons for leaving are always personal, and it’s hard to point to a specific political trend. But the discourse around leaving is indicative of a real crisis in the Israeli Left regarding the inability to effect change, the increasing sense that our ideals are unwanted, and that we are outnumbered. Not just at the polls, but at the family dinner table, too.

For me, this is not just about the normalization of racism and violence in the public sphere that goes along with the occupation. It is about the fact that so many Israelis who identify as liberal or left wing are either ignorant of the state’s actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians, or they are complicit in them.

When I first witnessed Israeli human rights violations and the violence of military occupation nearly a decade ago — through my activism with direct-action Arab-Jewish cooperative Ta’ayush — I found my most fundamental working assumptions about Israel upended.

Those experiences shaped my politics, almost instantaneously setting me apart from most Jewish Israelis. While other Israelis spent their Saturdays resting at home or going to family gatherings, I was escorting Palestinians to their wells and grazing lands in hopes that our — Israeli activists’ — presence might discourage attacks by Israeli settlers and confrontations with soldiers (sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn’t).

Returning to the comforts of my life in Tel Aviv I would find myself outraged that people could sit in cafes with no clue about what was being done in their name just a few miles away — or worse, that they didn’t care. That sharp dissonance began to affect more and more aspects of my life, including interactions with friends, family members and colleagues. It began to breed a constant sense of despair and resentment.

That was 10 years ago.

Likewise, it has been five years since the “tent protests,” when hundreds of thousands of — mostly Jewish — Israelis took to the streets to protest the high cost of living, ignoring the disenfranchised Palestinian population in our...

In a video shot in his office, Israel’s prime minister apologizes to the country’s Arab citizens for inciting against them. But a large portion of them couldn’t watch it — they live in ‘unrecognized villages’ that Israel refuses to connect to basic infrastructure like electricity, and the internet.

The timing is more likely related to Netanyahu’s attempts to push through “law and order” conditions he reportedly slapped on an already approved economic support package for Arab municipalities in Israel worth NIS 15 billion (nearly $4 billion). The package is meant to help narrow the yawning economic and social gaps between the Arab and Jewish sectors in Israel.

The fact that Netanyahu chose to put the video out this week is a slap in the face to the Bedouin citizens of Israel who live in the “unrecognized” village of al-Araqib, who have been facing demolitions and arrests while Netanyahu sat in his comfortable chair and recorded a video they couldn’t watch. Israeli authorities demolished the village for the 101st time Wednesday morning, the latest in a back-and-forth of demolition and rebuilding that has been ongoing since 2010. The village will mark six years of its struggle for recognition this Saturday.

Joint List Chairman MK Ayman Odeh published a response to Netanyahu’s video, in which points out that the 100,000 Arab citizens living in “unrecognized” villages like al-Araqib could not view the prime minister’s apology, since the state has never hooked them up to electricity or any other infrastructure — and certainly not internet connectivity.

[Click “CC” in the bottom right of the video if subtitles don’t appear automatically.]

Odeh nonchalantly mentions that Israel’s Arab citizens are natives of this land (mistakenly translated in the subtitles as “sons of the place”). What he means is that they are indigenous peoples, that they have just as much of a right to live here as Jews. This is of utmost importance, since Israel has never recognized this fact. When it comes to Bedouin land rights specifically, at the heart of...

Massive, unexpected turnout sent a powerful message in the wake of anti-LGBTQ hate speech in recent weeks. Yet the sterile police cordon in which the Pride Parade was forced to take place also served as an eerie reminder of its insecurity.

[Photo gallery follows the text.]

More than 25,000 Israelis turned out to march in Jerusalem’s 15th annual Pride Parade Tuesday evening, the largest turnout ever in the city’s history, coming a year after 16-year-old Shira Banki was stabbed to death in a hate crime targeting the march.

The huge number of security forces was impossible to ignore, however. Following the police’s tragic failure the previous year, and in response to alleged threats to attack this year’s parade, police set stringent entry requirements — namely, that all participants had to pass through a single entrance.

Thousands more than anyone expected showed up, leading to long lines at undermanned security checkpoints.

Once on the march route, participants passed by the exact location where Banki was murdered by ultra-Orthodox man Yishai Shlissel, who carried out a similar stabbing attack 10 years earlier and who was accused of attempting to orchestrate a third attack this year from behind bars. Participants placed flowers next to a giant photograph of 16-year-old Banki.

The security was so tight that no counter protesters were within sight, particularly, members of the racist Jewish purity group Lehava, which in the days leading up to the march distributed fliers offering gay conversion therapy. They were apparently cordoned off somewhere far away.

In fact, the streets were totally cleared of anyone but the marchers and policemen. The only passersby were people trying to join the march. It felt bizarre, like we were marching alone, among ourselves. It felt like all of downtown West Jerusalem was on lockdown.

And while the security appeared to dominate the scene, the record turnout brought with it an uplifting and bold declaration that Israel’s queer communities are here to stay.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat’s announcement a day earlier that he would not join the march (he never has) because, as he told Yedioth Ahronoth, “I don’t want to be part of the harm to the ultra-Orthodox public and the Religious-Zionist public,” was the worst possible thing he could have said, suggesting a...

Police arrest three children in ‘unrecognized’ village of Al-Araqib, as the Jewish National Fund continues its forestation project on village land.

Two children, 12 and 13, were arrested in the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Araqib in Israel’s south on Monday, as the Jewish National Fund (JNF) entered the village accompanied by police forces to resume cultivating land for a forestation project. Another youth was also arrested Tuesday morning, the circumstances of which are still unclear.

After a long and successful struggle to stop the JNF from cultivating the remaining plots of land that have not been destroyed, authorities returned this week, even establishing a camp southeast of the village’s cemetery.

Two minors were arrested for allegedly disrupting police conduct and assaulting an officer; they were released the following day and ordered to keep away from the plots for 30 days.

The land in question is currently in the process of ownership registration and has yet to be legally resolved. In 2012 an Israeli court ruled that no irreversible changes should be made on these plots of land, which the Bedouin families claim as their own. Despite promises made by JNF chairman Efi Stenzler to halt any work until the issue is cleared legally, tractors began plowing this week.

Al-Araqib has been demolished 100 times since July 2010. It is one of 35 “unrecognized” Bedouin villages in the Negev desert in southern Israel, which means Israel refuses to provide residents with connections to the national water and electricity grids, provide them with health and educational services, or any basic infrastructure.

Despite being citizens of Israel that are supposed to enjoy equal rights, the Israeli government and institutions such as the Israel Land Authority and Jewish National Fund have been waging a slow and methodical war of attrition against Bedouin residents of unrecognized villages in an effort to expel them.

As a result most of al-Araqib’s residents have indeed left to neighboring towns over the past several years. The tactics used by the state against these citizens are similar to those used in Area C of the occupied West Bank, where Palestinian residents have no rights, no representation, and their homes are repeatedly demolished.

Hotels in Israel are offering their Jewish clients some vacation segregation.

Staff at the Magic Sunrise Hotel in Eilat have been making phone calls of their own volition to Jewish clientele who have reservations this weekend to warn them that there will be a lot of Arabs at the hotel due to the Muslim Eid el-Fitr holiday, and offering them to cancel or push back their reservation free of charge, according to a report on Israel’s Channel 10 Tuesday.

In one audio recording of a conversation (Hebrew), the hotel employee can be heard telling a client that it will be crowded due to the end of Ramadan holiday, and that most of the clientele will be from the “migzar,” which means the “sector” in Hebrew, a common euphemism for Israel’s large Arab minority, over 20 percent of the country’s population. The hotel employee goes on to state, “albeit it Israelis, but from the migzar.”

The reporters called back to make sure the earlier call had not been from just one rogue employee. Another reservations agent confirmed the practice, saying, the hotel warns guests “that there will be a lot of Arabs this weekend.” Some guests, he continued, thank the agents for “saving the vacation” with their warnings. “I say it to all of the guests, it’s important to say it.”

According to the Channel 10 report this is a policy implemented by the Fattal hotel chain — and it is not the first time.

The same thing happened at several hotels in September 2015 (I reported on it here), when the Jewish High Holidays overlapped with the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday, except then the warnings were communicated at the time of booking. At the time, the Crown Plaza, Club Hotel and Astral Hotel were telling clients who called to make a reservation that they should take into account many Arabs will also be staying there.

Hotels in Israel, which in my experience are largely overpriced and not very generous, are offering their Jewish clients some vacation segregation.

Imagine for a moment that a hotel employee warned a white American making a reservation that blacks would also be staying there at the same time. Or if a hotel warned Christian guests that they might have to share the pool with Jewish families. This is exactly the same.

Al-Araqib is one of 35 ‘unrecognized’ villages in Israel that authorities refuse to provide with water, electricity or basic infrastructure.

Israeli security forces demolished the Bedouin village of al-Araqib for the 100th time Wednesday morning. It was the second demolition during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, taking place while residents were fasting. The first demolition in the village took place almost exactly six years ago, on July 27, 2010.

Al-Araqib is one of 35 “unrecognized” Bedouin villages in the Negev desert in southern Israel, a definition which means Israel refuses to provide residents with connections to the national water and electricity grids, provide them with health and educational services, or any basic infrastructure.

Despite being citizens of Israel that are supposed to enjoy equal rights, the Israeli government and its agents like the Israel Land Authority and Jewish National Fund have been waging a slow and methodical war of attrition against Bedouin residents of unrecognized villages in an effort to expel them.

As a result, most of al-Araqib’s residents have indeed left over the years to neighboring towns. The tactics used by the state against these citizens is pretty much identical to that which it uses in Area C of the occupied West Bank, where Palestinian residents are deprived of basic services and their homes are repeatedly demolished.

Like countless plots of land in the Negev, al-Araqib was expropriated under the Land Appropriation Law of 1953. The law allowed the state to easily expropriate land for purposes of “development, settlement and security,” with a few ludicrous stipulations: that the land was not in its owner’s possession on April 1, 1952, and that the state use the land for purposes of development, settlement or security, or at least that it needs the land for those purposes.

In reality, the state dispossessed the village residents of their land, and has not once used it for any purpose. The only plans for al-Araqib are to plant a “forest” on its arid land.

Nearby, Israeli authorities are expelling the residents of another “unrecognized” Bedouin village, Umm el-Hiran, in order to build a Jewish town in its place.

A major Israeli university revokes a prize intended for Breaking the Silence claiming that its work opposing the occupation ‘isn’t in the national consensus.’ What does that say about Israel as a nation?

Breaking the Silence, an organization of former IDF soldiers who oppose Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, was supposed to receive the Berelson Prize for Jewish-Arab Understanding from Ben-Gurion University this week, a NIS 20,000 ($5,100) award that the university’s Middle East studies department has given out annually for a quarter century.

However, university president Professor Rivka Carmi decided to overrule the decision and vetoed Breaking the Silence’s award. The reason the university cited is that the organization, which publishes testimonies of soldiers about their military service in the occupied territories, is “an organization that isn’t in the national consensus, and giving it the prize is liable to be interpreted as an appearance of political bias.”

As Haaretz pointed out, recipients of the prize in years past have “include[d] Egyptian playwright Ali Salem; Palestinian poet in Israel, Siham Daoud; the Parents Circle – Families Forum, an organization of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families; Physicians for Human Rights; a bilingual school in the Galilee; Sikkuy – the Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality; and the Andalus publishing house.” Considering this list, Breaking the Silence does not constitute much more “political bias” than most of the others.

Carmi’s move to deliberately go out of her way and revoke the prize is rare and noteworthy, especially because she is thought of as a liberal and an advocate of academic freedom who has taken the Right to task for opposing those values. This is the same university and the same president who have been the targets of attacks by far-right-wing group Im Tirtzu, which in 2010 threatened to encourage donor boycotts of the university over what it deemed the “anti-Zionist tilt” of its politics and government department.

At the time, Carmi came out resolutely against Im Tirzu, becoming a prominent voice in Israel advocating for academic freedom. In a 2013 oped she wrote, “a strong Israel is one where everyone’s opinion can be heard without fear, if only to help us learn to articulate why we don’t agree.” This is also the same university that is home to professors like Oren Yitachel and Neve Gordon, whose work inside and outside the classroom highlights Israeli human rights violations and directly opposes Israeli occupation. Gordon has even come out...

A new video portrays a ‘nightmare scenario’ in which Jerusalem residents elect a Palestinian mayor.

One would think a group that calls itself “Save Jewish Jerusalem” would hail from the right side of the political spectrum. But when it comes to maintaining Israel’s demographic dominance, it seems there isn’t much of a difference between the Right and Left.

The initiative, which seeks to maintain control over Jerusalem through further disenfranchising its Palestinian residents, released a racist video on Wednesday, portraying a scenario set in 2020 in which an Arab is elected mayor of the city, after its Palestinian residents (nearly 40 percent of the population) decide to vote in municipal elections. Despite having the right to vote, Palestinians have largely boycotted Jerusalem’s municipal elections for the last 50 years in protest of Israel’s occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem.

In the video, which its creators fashioned as a horror-thriller, revolves around a Palestinian political leader trying to convince a group of militants that the only way to get Jerusalem back is to do exactly what Netanyahu warned about on election day last March: go to the polling stations “in droves.”

After years of trying to kill Israeli Jews in a variety of ways, the leader tells the militants that it is time to “beat them using their own weapon: democracy,” and convinces them that every Palestinian resident in the city should take advantage of their right to vote in municipal elections, since they are the majority. (The video assumes that by 2020, Palestinians will constitute over 50 percent of Jerusalem’s population).

The video then shows a Palestinian man armed with explosives and guns walking to a polling station. When he arrives he puts down all of his weapons down and instead wields his new weapon — a blue ID card. The video then flashes to two months later, when the leader of the group has become Jerusalem’s new mayor. The leader is congratulated over the phone with an “Allahu Akbar” and “the Temple Mount is in our hands,” a direct reference to a similar quote by Lt. Gen. Mordechai “Motta” Gur, whose IDF division captured the Old City of Jerusalem in the 1967 War. A large picture of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem is seen behind the new mayor’s desk, straddled by photographs of Netanyahu and Rabin.

Having a daily routine to go back to that is free of violence is a privilege that most Israelis have and most Palestinians do not.

I was out last night in Tel Aviv at a poetry book launch for a good friend when the news flashed on my phone that there was a shooting in the Sarona Market. I got that sinking feeling in my gut and couldn’t take my eyes off Twitter, even as I continued to drink my beer and listen to the recitation of deeply moving and thoughtful contemporary Hebrew poetry.

Life does go on here despite the violence. That’s just the reality. But when I read the statement by Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai that Israelis cannot let such terror “disrupt our lives” and that we should “return to business as usual” tomorrow, I become enraged. Why shouldn’t this disrupt our lives? It did disrupt our lives and will continue to disrupt the lives of many Israelis — among them, the victims, their families and friends, all the people who work in Sarona, all the people who have been there, who live around there, etc. Why should we continue to sip our cappuccinos and beers without being disrupted and disturbed? Why shouldn’t such an act, and so many others like it, cause us to take pause?

The word “disruption” here also dismisses the fact that the lives of so many Palestinians are “disrupted” all the time. The entire city of Yatta, where the two murderers are from — a population of about 65,000 people in the occupied West Bank — is now under military lockdown. This is collective punishment, a mass “disruption” if you will, on top of the already systematic “disruption” of military occupation. No Israeli city, town or settlement has ever been under lockdown after one of its residents committed a violent act against Palestinians.

Mayor Huldai implored us to go back to our routine, back to business as usual. But this is completely misguided. Many people often comment on how remarkable it is that Israelis can just go on with their lives within all the terror. But strength and resilience will not come from trying to push reality aside, disregarding the entire picture and continuing on as if life here is normal. Rather true strength will come from looking critically and deeply at all the factors that go into perpetuating systematic,...

Eyewitnesses say Border Police officers attacked an Arab worker in central Tel Aviv after he allegedly refused to show them his identity card. Police: The suspect refused to identify himself and attacked the police officers, biting one of them.

An Arab employee of a supermarket located on the main thoroughfare of Ibn Gvirol Street, opposite Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, was reportedly beaten by plainclothes Border Police officers on Sunday afternoon. According to several eyewitnesses, the motive behind the beating was the employee’s ethnicity.

While it is still unclear what exactly happened, we do have several eyewitnesses who posted statuses on Facebook, one of whom spoke to +972, as well as a report published by Israeli news sites, among them Walla! . According to these sources, an employee of Yuda Market, a mini-market, went out to dispose of some garbage, when he was approached by a plainclothes officer who, without identifying himself, demanded to see the man’s identity card. When the employee said his I.D. card was inside the store and asked the Border Police officer to identify himself, he and a friend began beating him. More officers and other citizens quickly joined in. The video published by Walla! shows there were numerous people involved in the assault.

This is an excerpt from the Facebook status of Erez Krispin, one of the eyewitnesses:

“His only sin was that he’s not a Jew,” said Kobi Cohen, the owner of the supermarket, to a reporter from Walla! News. +972 has tried to contact Cohen for comment but he has not yet responded.

Israel Police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld told +972:

The police response does not confirm or deny the fact that the man is, according to his employer, an Israeli citizen, a Bedouin from a Negev town. This would counter the claim that he was a Palestinian without a work permit Given the number of people seen in the video beating this one man, it is not surprising that some of the policemen were bruised in the fracas.

According to a local Palestinian media outlet, his name is Maysam Abu-Alqi’an. He was reportedly treated at Ichilov hospital, Sunday evening.

Joint List Chairman Ayman Odeh responded to the incident, saying that “Instead of serving and protecting Arab citizens, the police presents a genuine danger to their safety.”

MK Dov Khenin, also of the Joint List, said he has turned to the Minister of Public Security with an...

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I am an independent writer, translator and editor, originally from NYC. My publications include The Guardian, The New York Times, Salon, The Daily Beast, National Geographic, Al Jazeera America, The Forward, etc.

I began reporting for The Guardian in January 2015. Previously I worked as an editor with Haaretz.com from 2012-2014 and before that as an editor here on +972. I have also worked for various NGOs, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Ir Amim. I am fascinated by the role Israel plays in Jewish identity and American politics and wrote my MA thesis on the changing definition of “pro-Israelism” in American Jewry.

I am active with Ta’ayush, a direct-action Arab-Jewish group whose activism focuses on the human and political rights of the rural Palestinian communities of the occupied South Hebron Hills.

About +972 Magazine

+972 is an independent, blog-based web magazine. It was launched in August 2010, resulting from a merger of a number of popular English-language blogs dealing with life and politics in Israel and Palestine.

+972 is an independent, blog-based web magazine. It was launched in August 2010, resulting from a merger of a number of popular English-language blogs dealing with life and politics in Israel and Palestine.